Network digital video recorders (nDVR), network personal video recorders (nPVR), remote storage digital video recorder (rs-DVR), and like equipment are network-based digital video recorders that may be stored or located on the cloud at a server location or at a content provider's location rather than at a consumer's private location or home. Such network devices have effectively increased the consumer's ability to time shift the consumption of programs (i.e., to record, download, or stream a program and ultimately consume the program or parts thereof at a later time that best suits the consumer). This ability to time shift also provides the consumer with enhanced power to consume only selected portions of programs by, for example, skipping or fast-forwarding through portions of recorded content, and also to consume parts of a program multiple times via use of rewinding or the like.
In an nDVR or time-shifted content delivery system, video content available for playback may be recorded, transcoded, and stored in several video formats. Typically, each format consists of a different video resolution and bitrate, to enable adaptive bitrate streaming. The multiplicity of different stream formats and bit rates enables the content to be sourced to devices with different capabilities, such as high definition televisions of wide ranging sizes, personal computers, tablet computers, smart phones, and other client devices. In addition, the different bit rates support adaptive streaming, whereby the receiving client has the ability to measure network congestion and request a lower or higher bit rate stream from the source which may eliminate visual impairments caused by network congestion (e.g. macro-blocking due to dropped packets, frozen frames) at the expense of higher resolution video. Any of several video delivery protocols, such as, for instance, HTTP Live Streaming, may be used to deliver the adaptive bitrate content to end users.